


The Motorcycle Accident

by chezchuckles



Series: Trauma Spy [5]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: F/M, Trauma Spy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:22:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25758046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chezchuckles/pseuds/chezchuckles
Summary: Colin brings the boys to the hospital after Kate takes her motorcycle out, doing a runner, and crashes it. Within the first or second year of living at the house in the woods.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Series: Trauma Spy [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1821298
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	The Motorcycle Accident

  
The third time he comes prepared.  
  
His shoulders tense as he approaches makes the right turn onto the long drive, bare oaks somehow starker for the sunlight of the afternoon. He can feel the Klonopin in the pocket of his cargo pants, the scored, blue pills calling to him, a warning klaxon setting up a discordant jangling underneath his pulse beat. But Wyatt’s uncomfortable hum breaks through it all, a few seconds of steady, unhappy noise that falls off until James’ quiet babble fills the space of the Subaru.  
  
“No drugs while driving you two,” Colin tells them. “Your dad would kill me.”  
  
“Mommy,” James says.  
  
“Nope. Not today.”  
  
“Mommy,” Wyatt echoes, an ominously insistent note in his voice. “Mommy.”  
  
“Doesn’t matter how much you say it, kid,” Colin murmurs as he guides the car into the parking space.  
  
The first time he came here, before he’d even turned the car off, he’d felt her. A sucking, drowning whirlpool, a darkness that would pull his whole ship down and God only knew what else.  
  
He pulls the Klonopin from his pocket, swallows one dry and tucks two under his tongue, the chalky scratch of the pills and the faint sweetness already such a reassurance as he pulls his phone and messages his brother -- In the lot with the kids.  
  
He glances in the rearview, sees Wyatt struggling dismally against the car seat, James peering out the window with a yearning kind of wistfulness.  
  
“Fine. Fuck. Your dad better get his ass down here.”  
  
The Klonopin’s the first layer of armor, and a damn effective one. He doesn’t even realize he’s felt the tug of her whirlpool, that it’s been pulling him steadily out, until the drug starts to wash over him, a peaceful, quiet tide that lets him coast toward the sandy shore. The massive toy Humvee he wrestles out of the back is the second. A little more hope involved in this one than in his drugs, but he’s pretty he doesn’t want to be the one Castle finds feeding Clonazepam to the kids.  
  
He leaves the miniature truck on the asphalt and brings himself around to the passenger side, starts unbuckling the wriggling Wyatt and then inserting him into a winter coat in a move that he’s far too adept at. Slinging the kid under one arm draws out a helpless giggle, still less enthusiastic than usual, as he walks around the hood and goes through the same with James.  
  
“Mommy,” James mutters, a little sullen.  
  
“I head you, kid. Promise she’s working on getting her shit together ASAP. Want a lift?”  
  
The kid shakes his head resolutely, managing to clumsily hop to the ground. Colin follows, Wyatt muttering discontentedly at him, as James kicks up into a wobbly run at the industrially grey building. There’s a small pine tree they’ve wound some colored lights around, some electric candles shining from the windows even in the daylight. It’s the first time he’s been able to pay enough attention to notice. The kid’s clipping along over the brown grass, racing towards the lights with a terrifying purpose and then swerving towards the door.  
  
“Oh hell no,” Colin mutters, jogging forward himself and scooping the kid under his other arm. James tenses, a vibrating, angry tightness snapping through his whole body, and Wyatt starts to squirm. When he finally gets to the still-open trunk – fuck, he has no idea how his brother deals with the daily lack of security that two toddlers entail – and the Humvee at the ground, Wyatt’s immediately wriggling down at it.  
  
“Eep,” Wyatt says, somehow still his default word for anything remotely car like. James remains balled up against Colin’s side, but fuck if he’s going to feel guilty about it.  
  
Except the sudden shut down, the similarities to his mother, the way everything just becomes a white static – it’s hard not to feel some of it. “You don’t even need drugs, do you, you little empath? You got your mom to thank for that, even if we can’t quite thank her for some of the other shit.”  
  
“Shut the fuck up,” he hears behind him, Castle’s voice little more than a tired rumble.  
  
“Daddy! Eep!” Wyatt cheers, flinging his hands up from the Humvee.  
  
James stays but immediately holds his arms out, face ducked towards the ground like he’s not sure to trust if his father will actually take him. But Castle reaches out, of course, cuddling the kid against his chest and bouncing in his knees, murmuring something soothing under his breath. Colin takes the moment to study his brother, the dark circles under his eyes, cheekbones too prominent, skin too pale. “I can’t stay long,” Castle murmurs, reaching down, ruffling Wyatt’s hair.  
  
“Eep,” Wyatt says, bouncing up and down in the passenger seat.  
  
“It’s a Humvee, kid. Where the fuck did you find a miniature Humvee?”  
  
“I know a guy,” Colin says. It’s more intricately crafted than any plastic toddler car has a right to be, the sharp lines of the hood, cloth of the seats, even the door handle mechanisms. He’s really rather proud of it.  
  
“Want the car, Jay?” Castle asks James, but the kid just burrows into his chest. “I think he knows. I gotta go back up there, Col. Fuck. I can’t. I can’t do this right now.”  
  
The jittering, exhausted waves rolling off him would have knocked Colin flat without the depressants. As it is, now that they’re both standing still, the force of it makes him dizzy.  
  
“I’ll go sit with her.”  
  
“Colin,” his brother murmurs, a hushed warning in his voice.  
  
“Took some Klonapin.” He can taste the last of it dissolving under his tongue. “After I drove your parasites. Stay out here with them. Just for now. I talked to Carrie and she and Eastman are gonna come up tonight. Hang out with us at the castle.”  
  
“Their families –“  
  
“That’s what I said. She said the boys were family and she’s bringing the hedgehog.”  
  
“Daddy,” James murmurs, burrowing harder into his father’s side.  
  
“Daddy, daddy,” Wyatt echoes, clambering around the miniature Humvee.  
  
“Shit,” Castle says.  
  
“An hour. Snuggle the little fuckers, push them around in their brand new car, and I’ll be back before you know it.”  
  
Castle swallows. “You’ll text if –“  
  
“I’m going up now,” Colin says, then reaches and yanks his brother in for a fast hug, the kid getting a little crushed between them. “Merry Christmas.”

\-----

The third time, he’s convinced he’s battle-ready, the Klonopin just dissolved under his tongue, Beckett in her own room instead of the commotion of the ICU. But even as he approaches her door, even through the pleasant filter of the drugs that makes everything damper, softer, quieter, he can feel her, can hear her, the chaos clamoring out of her head and into the hallway. His feet drag, slow, every instinct pressing at him to turn the fuck around as fast as possible. But his damn brother hasn’t seen real daylight in days, hasn’t been able to surface from this place for longer than a quarter of an hour to reassure his sons (after that first disaster of a time, fuck, those kids are never coming in this building again), and for once, Colin can admit that Castle needs a break more than he does.  
  
She’s crying when he enters the room. It’s not quite that silent stoic shit that he’s seen too much of from her – no, her chest is heaving, and there’s a catch at the end of each breath, a high, pained kind of noise. He balks in the doorway, fishes another Klonopin out of pocket and presses it under his tongue. She hasn’t heard him come in; one hand, covered in bandages but not encased in layers upon layers of plaster and ace bandage, covering her eyes.  
  
The pain would be bad enough.  
  
It’s not just the pain.  
  
It’s the breaks in her steel walls, breaks that somehow allow out fragmented flashes from the well of horror that she stores up inside her. The fractured memories crystallize outside herself in the kind of images he has never gotten from anyone, not from the kids, not from Castle, not from the countless men and woman who have spent their dying moments within ten feet of him. Somehow, spilling out of her now, they fill the room with a presence so much stronger than reality.  
  
Black standing next to her cot, her wrists bound in soft restraints as he leans over her, his hand resting lightly, possessively on her swollen stomach. Giving a soft order to Saber, who approaches from the side with a sneer and a needle that he shoves into her arm, coursing fire through her blood, her heart pounding double time fingers toes arms chest coursing with pain.  
  
The twins not yet one week old, soft against her, the steady warmth of their bodies on her skin, first warmth she’s felt in months, and then the shrieks as two men step in and pull them away. Strong hands around her arms as she moves to go after them, the slam of her heel into the arch of a foot behind her, the spin of her body back up and around so that her knee connects with a groin, then four more hands on her, slamming her to the ground as the babies cries get louder and louder but always further away.  
  
The spread of pictures. Her mother’s body sprawled in the alley, one hand reaching out, a smear of blood fifteen feet behind her as she used whatever strength was left in her to wriggle forward. Her father in that same alley but slumped back against the washed-out brick, his body tilted to the side, his eyes open in some kind of glassy horror. His body on a shining metal table, eyes still open to show that cold and vivid blue, skin of his chest and stomach peeled away to display the red sinew of his muscles, the dull chalk of his ribs, the glossy sheen of his internal organs. That same scene with her mother’s green eyes, the narrower taper of ribs, the vibrant red of the inside of her body.   
  
He swallows past the thick, uncomfortable nausea in his throat.  
  
“Hey, Becks,” he murmurs, or tries to – it’s impossible to tell what volume he’s using when she’s screaming so loudly in her own fucking head, projecting her horror so clearly, so concretely.  
  
She’s silent, but he feels her wrestling, wrestling to get control of the pain, wrestling to cram it all back inside herself. He clenches his fingers in a tight fist, breathes through the illogical guilt – he doesn’t blame himself for any but the last of it. Wyatt had stumbled into the room and grabbed his hand and started pulling him towards something utterly inconsequential that he can’t recall for the life of him, and he’d only hastily shut the file folder before following the kid. He’d gotten distracted by the boys in the living room and gone back to the kitchen, maybe forty-five minutes later, to the photos of both crimes scenes, both autopsies in a lurid spread, the sight of her parents’ blood all over the planed wood of their kitchen table.  
  
He won’t ever forget the look on her face, but until now he’s never felt the sheer depth of her horror. (He’d thought, for days, that it was just the copper walls dampening it, but then they’d walked out to the creek and he’d yet again been bowled over by the sheer intensity of her internal fortifications.)  
  
“Fuck,” she finally rasps, swiping ineffectually at her cheek with her bandaged hand. “Get the hell out.”  
  
He forces his legs to move to the plastic chair by her bed, his brother’s home for the past several days. “No can do, Beckett. My brother’s finally breathing in some sunlight and fresh air with those demon spawn, and you know the second I walk away he’s coming right back up to this shithole.”  
  
She tilts her head slightly, her cheeks still streaked with tears she can’t seem to stop, her chin bandaged – her body, really, wrapped in bandages, everywhere he can see that’s not covered by the pile of downy blankets – the alpaca, cashmere, pashmina, soft pastel colors that he’d passed to his brother at the door two days ago. “I don’t let it out,” she grasps out. “I swear I do so much better when he’s in here.”  
  
Colin’s fairly certain she means keeping it all boxed away, and not that her actual state is any better at all. “Good, because you’re a special kind of hell right now, sweetheart.”  
  
She lets out a noise halfway between a laugh and a sob. “What are you on right now? Do you have any more?”  
  
He beams at her the best he can, trying to arrange his face into something mirthful. “Not even Advil. You crash because of the interaction of any of this shit with the elixir and Castle’ll circle the drain right along with you.”  
  
“Crashed already,” she says.  
  
“Teaches me to try and do something nice for you.”  
  
She blinks, her gaze latching onto him with a little more clarity. “Just my fault. Told Castle that ten times already.”  
  
“We know that,” Colin mutters, but even as he says it he feels a hard knot in the pit of his stomach at her obvious pain when she breathes, at the overlarge soft cast that encases her arm, and he knows that whatever he’s feeling his brother is feeling tenfold. Colin’s the one who brought the bike back to the damn fortress in the first place, but Castle’s been carrying this shit more and more, and he wouldn’t have let go of leaving the keys to the bike right by the door when she was in a spiral, when she was, according to one of the troopers, a lucky spin of the wheel away from careening over the barrier and into certain death.  
  
She shakes her head a little, her lips parting and then closing, a few tears still streaking from her eyes.  
  
“I do have something for you that’s not nearly as good as drugs.” He swallows the sarcasticMerry Christmas that he almost says; up here, on this floor, there are no signs of celebration, and he’s sure his brother hasn’t said a word.  
  
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the string of stones, their green so deep it’s almost black, veins of red swirling up to the surface throughout. She reaches out, her movement pained (he knows on a bone-deep level that every flicker of movement sets off a cavernous agony not only in her wrist and ribs but in her chin, hands, hip, shoulder, the places where her body slammed into the asphalt at ninety-five miles an hour and her skin was torn from her), brushes an index finger over the surprisingly cool stone. “What’s this?” she finally rasps.  
  
“Heliotrope – bloodstone. A girl in Djibouti gave it to me when I was dying. She managed to get me hidden behind some crates on a container ship with these beads and a bottle of water, told me if I prayed enough I’d make it.”  
  
“Prayed?”  
  
Colin smirks. “Obviously I didn’t pray. But I sure as hell held onto those during the five days I spent on that ship. Sometimes they felt like the only real thing, especially after a stormy spell when the water rolled away and I was too weak to reach it. I kept coming back from these horrible, vivid hallucinations to the feel of those beads. Let me know what was real.”  
  
“Looks like a rosary,” she rasps.  
  
He pushes the stones into her open palm, wrapped with bandages, just her index finger and thumb remarkably unscathed. “The Islamic equivalent – a misbahah. Not as common, but they use it to perform the dhikr. Ninety-nine beads, ninety-nine names of Allah.”  
  
“You fake being religious for that girl, Col?” she asks, a small smile on her face that he knows is costing her.  
  
“I tried, but I was helpless. I’d hear the adhans ringing out from the mosques and duck into the nearest doorway to avoid it. I was in constant atonement – I’m passable with Arabic but my brain was always dropping the requisite God Willing when I should have said it.”  
  
He’s not sure how much she’s registering, right now, but she’s rolling one of the beads between her unbandaged fingers, and while her eyes are full of a dark kind of pain they’re still focused on him.  
  
“You drop inshallah when you shouldn’t and you’re supposed to stop and say a phrase from the Qur’an – roughly, May my Lord guide me to a nearer course to the right than this. And for some reason in that cargo hold that was all I could think. Not the 99 names of Allah. Just –guide me to a nearer course to the right than this. Over and over as I counted the beads.”  


She heaves a breath. “Can’t get much further from the right, right now.”  
  
“At least you didn’t hurt him,” Colin says, but the words taste like ash and he knows as soon as they leave his mouth how wrong it is.  
  
“They keep calling him my husband,” she whispers. “The fucking cover ID I grabbed when I got the keys – they keep calling him my husband and he comes in here and bows his head and sobs when he thinks I’m sleeping.”  
  
“Hell,” he mutters, his throat raw even though he knows this, knows from moment that trooper called days ago what cover she’s took, knows from the constant catch of his brother’s voice on the phone that he’s been crying over her. He has nothing to offer, except the knowledge that Castle and her kids are physically intact, and right now that seems meager, not nearly enough.  
  
That bleak knowledge blankets them, settling over their silted conversation, creating a lull of quiet that she finally breaks with a raw voice. “Can’t you keep him?” She pauses, clears her throat, her fingers stroking over the bloodstone beads. “If he could just stay out there…” she trails off, but he hears it at the end, a hope she can’t put into words – if he can stay out there maybe he could be untainted, protected, insulated from the well of pain that seems so inescapable in this room, in this building.  
  
“You know I can’t. Haven’t been able to keep him since he saw you standing over Black with a scalpel in your hand.”  
  
She shakes her head, her eyes filling but not spilling over, and he feels it, the clamoring pain that wants to carry her away, the mental horror that swells with her physical anguish. “I just wanted something…” she murmurs, but she lets that thought lapse, too, their conversation too far from anything for which she has the expression.  
  
“A course nearer to the right,” Colin says. The tears spill over, again, finally, and he can do nothing but sit there as the last of the Klonapin muffles everything to a duller kind of ache, sit and watch her fingers stroking over the beads, arrhythmic, irregular, but stumbling through the motion, stone by stone. 

\-----


End file.
